OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization and company, known for developing generative AI models like ChatGPT and DALL-E. It was initially founded in December 2015 as a non-profit research lab by individuals including Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The core problem it aimed to solve was the risk of AI power being concentrated in a few corporations or governments, with its founding mission being to ensure that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—would benefit all of humanity.
To fund the massive computational resources required for advanced AI, OpenAI underwent a significant structural change in 2019, transitioning from a pure non-profit to a "capped-profit" entity, OpenAI LP, which is controlled by the original non-profit, OpenAI, Inc.. This mechanism allowed it to legally attract large investments, such as the over $13 billion invested by Microsoft since 2019, while capping investor returns to a multiple of their investment. The company's products, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models, work by using large language models (LLMs) trained on massive datasets to generate human-like text and code, or images from natural language prompts.
OpenAI's work is closely connected to the concept of AGI and its strategic partnership with Microsoft, which integrates OpenAI's models into its products like Copilot and provides the Azure-based supercomputing platform for training. The structure has changed recently: in October 2025, the for-profit arm transitioned into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), known as OpenAI Group PBC, which is a purpose-driven company structure that must consider both shareholders and the mission. The non-profit, renamed the OpenAI Foundation, retained control and a 26% stake in the PBC, while Microsoft holds a 27% stake. This change replaced the complex capped-profit structure with a more standard capital structure, while the non-profit's control over the mission and the for-profit entity stayed the same.